Green Hand Initiative

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Like many of you, I attended the local version of “Hogwarts.”
Spelling, ciphers, rituals and rites, we did it all. Thing is, when everybody
does it, such magic seems ordinary. Where the local equivalent of Lord
Voldemort enters the plotline is when people leaving such institutions turn
their backs on the generative power of a liberal education to shape and
navigate their worlds, becoming instead passive consumers of other people’s worldviews.
Our creative power doesn’t just vanish when, whether by negligence or design,
we cede it to some external authority. No my friends, when we hand over our
magic it tends to be used against us. Cruelly, this holds true even if we are
unaware that we have done so, but then, nobody ever said being a wizard was all
fun and wand duels.

More than ever, education today bears the signature of the
Dark Lord and his handiwork. With each turn of the testing vise and each click
of the regulatory ratchet, classroom teachers are being reduced to
progressively more frantic, fragmented, harried, anxious, and sick people. When
children are presented with people reduced to such a state as caregivers,
authority figures and bearers of knowledge, on a basic organismic level, they
tend to do two things: 1. recoil in instinctive horror and shut down, and/or 2.
embrace this as an image of maturity worthy of emulation, seeing it as normal
and inevitable. Either way, the Dark Lord’s got ’em. Good job, Minions of the
Dark Lord!

Nonetheless, the fact remains: in language is power. And,
just as during the ages when scribes lived in temples and words were spoken over potions,
writing and speaking are still magical acts. Yet the way it’s been taught for
generations turns a good many people off to it. As a schoolteacher I once made
a living helping students heal their relationship with what we now call “language arts” –
listening, speaking, reading, and particularly writing. I succeeded, to the
extent that I did, largely because I did not teach as I had been taught. As a
student, I had seen magic in language, but I didn’t see much magic in my
teachers, at least not the kind I wanted to emulate. And even though my primary
education happened when Hogwarts was still a long ways from its birth through
JK Rowling’s literary imagination, when it comes to teaching reading and
writing, those who aren’t participating in the magic can’t do it right.

Eventually, having sat on both sides of the teacher’s desk
for quite a few years, I came to suspect that this was the actual agenda: to
drain the magic from these inherently magical acts, and to render them not
merely difficult – for they do require rigor and application, as any
skill worth pursuing typically will – but simultaneously difficult and without
value: something never to do again unless one absolutely has to.

Because after all, it simply wouldn’t do to have people
really tapping into the power there —that is, unless we hire them as advertising
and public relations professionals who tell others what they should want, or as
journalists and political speechwriters who tell others what’s important, what’s
worth talking about, and how to conceptualize the events of the day.

And why would I be writing about magic and language in a
blog focused on building personal resilience through community?Shouldn’t we be focused instead on how
to amend soils to produce rich crops of potatoes, for example, or how to make a
tincture that can stanch blood from a wound if conventional medicine is
unavailable or unaffordable?

Yes, and no. My sense is, the problems are deeper than these
solutions. However – and this is key – implementing these kinds of solutions
does tend to address the deeper level problems, because sharing this knowledge
shifts the culture. If we want to take on our cultural Voldemort, here’s the
magic formula, condensed into its essential and functionally related components.
We’ll use growing potatoes as an example: 1. Talking about growing your own
potatoes shifts the prevailing conversation. 2. This shift in the conversation
can either be driven by or drive an underlying shift of values —
that is, what’s important to people. As values change, so does language, and
with language, perception, and with perception, the capacity and motivation to
act. 3. As values shift, language shifts with it, serving as an extragenetic
code that helps to both anchor and spread those values.

This is why our reskilling conversations are important. Stakes
like these are not small potatoes. Let’s take this apart piece by piece.

What’s worth talking about? Baseball? The president’s latest
gaffe? The newest iPhone? This year’s fall fashions for 20-somethings?
Venezuela? Global warming? The best California white zinfandels?A person might follow any or all of
these interest areas, but the basic rule is, people talk about what matters to
them. So far, so good. However, the corollary to this is that because we are
social creatures, hearing people talk about things tends to subtly convey that
something is worth talking about. The media take advantage of this second
dynamic all the time, focusing on this or that idiotic thing, keeping the cultural
narratives within predetermined limits. Whether we’re age two or fifty-two, the
effect on us is basically: “It seems like everybody’s talking about it! It must
be important!” We then endeavor to participate. We buy into those narratives in
large part because by doing so we gain a sense of belonging. We don’t want to
feel left out.

As long as we parrot the manufactured debates and
controversies back and forth among ourselves – and what side of these
controversies we’re on matters a lot less in the end than we’d like to think – the
dark wizards will have their way with us. Certain thoughts will become
unthinkable. As soon as we start our own conversations, however, we regain a
measure of control in our language, values, culture, and minds.

Notice also that, as we do this in any area of interest or
inquiry, a special vocabulary starts to develop, and with it, a subculture. If
the problem is the culture, it seems sensible that the solution might begin
with a subculture, a cultural trial balloon.

2. This shift in the
conversation can either be driven by or drive an underlying shift of values — that is, what’s important to people.

Again, the process works both ways: yes, we talk about what
matters to us, but what others are talking about can reach a threshold where
not joining in the conversation carries the risk of being perceived as an
outsider who does not share underlying values. There are social consequences to
this. As a mild example, take the Superbowl, a social phenomenon that generates
a lot of discussion, all of which carries the connotation of its own importance.
Not to participate in “water cooler conversations” about the Superbowl means,
basically, a separation from those who do participate. However, by the same
conversational token, those who take the time to generate conversations that
reflect a different underlying value structure can, theoretically, shift the
broader culture.

Fundamentally, language does not exist without social context
and underlying values. The famous linguistic quip about the number of words for
‘snow’ in Inuit languages reflects how context-driven language is, but it
really implies something deeper than that: we name aspects of reality because
of what we value. Skiiers likewise have words for variations in the quality of
snow – expressions like “death cookies” and “frozen granular” – because snow also
matters to them. Language is, always, about what we value. It’s a bit of a
simplification but provisionally useful nonetheless to say that those who dominate
the narratives shape the culture by controlling the values.

Interestingly, however, one of the consequences of this
process is that just as having a name for something tends to steer awareness
toward it and make it visible and important, conversely, leaving a thing nameless
or not talking about it can steer awareness away from it. I have nephews who
can name the make, model and year of pretty much any car that happens to drive
by. They grew up in a family where cars were “a thing” – something to relate to and,
more importantly, something to relate with other family members through. I did not grow up in such a
family. In consequence, the subtleties on which they base their ability to
distinguish the various automobiles are invisible to me. I can distinguish a
truck from a car from an SUV. To my nephews, the subtleties they tune into
aren’t even subtle: They see completely different things.

So it’s not just a binary function of seeing versus not
seeing something. Once established, cultural context shapes our interactions
with the thing we name. One can see why those who want to “control the
narratives” would not willingly concede that power, which in effect is the
power to make some things invisible, make other things appear and grow before
us, and shape how people respond to them. Hence the ingenious stratagem of hiding
the possibility of generating narratives in plain sight and making schoolchildren
decide it’s all a big bore – at the same time as they are conditioned to accept
what they are given. Despite the fact
thatthe world of the unnamed vastly
exceeds the extent of the named world, most people choose to inhabit a consciousness
bounded by the naming of things. This fact implies something truly
astonishing for those willing to contemplate it, and it also implies an
alternative. I will be exploring this further in Part II of this blog post.

3. As values shift,
language shifts with it, serving as an extra-genetic code that helps to both anchor
and spread those values.

So let’s look at where we’ve arrived in this journey: Language,
which gathers its power to signify from cultural contexts and values, also
shapes both what we can see and how we see the things. In influencing the
range of consciousness, it also changes our interactions with the world. This
in turn generates feedback cycles both within societies and between a given
society and its local and global contexts. We treat the earth and one another
as we see the earth and one another. In practical terms, this shapes the world.
These feedback vortices, like hurricanes, are more or less stable for a period of time, depending on a host of factors, primary among them being the
adaptability of language and culture in response to changing feedbacks and
conditions.

That all sounds very academic, but for the purposes of this
blog what it means is that in sharing how to grow potatoes, for example, it
absolutely matters that in doing so, one is introducing the potato plant itself
into this conversation. Suddenly in this context a potato becomes less an
article of commerce and more of a product of mysterious processes of life in
which I participate and invite others to join. The conversation, and any activity
around it, represents a shift in a prevailing cultural narrative: Potatoes do
not come from bags in grocery stores or French fry cartons. And by the way, do
you know what’s going on underground in the depths of the soil? Well, I don’t know
exactly, either, but one thing I do know: it matters. As that value shifts,
so too does consciousness, and ultimately what’s possible in very practical
terms –
an effect that goes well beyond potatoes.

My hope is that people will bring this kind of awareness to
their reskilling conversations, whatever they may be. It’s not just about the
potato that comes up out of the ground or the calendula flower and what it can
do; it’s the fullness of the shift, it’s a statement about what matters and how
this shift can help to antidote a toxic culture.

In Part II, we will be exploring how deep this can go. Thus
far, while it’s true people might not understand why you’d talk about potatoes, or what you’re really saying, it will probably still sound to them
like you’re speaking English or Spanish or whatever, not incanting in some
magic tongue to conjure up a new world. We’ll see what we can do about that
next time. Bring your wands.

Thursday, November 23, 2017

I’ve been thinking lately about generosity and the sweetness
it brings to life. Those who are generous – with their time, knowledge, and
resources – are tapping into something essential for life to truly
flourish.

How can we find a generous mindset? How can we live
generosity as a value? What’s the feeling inside generous impulses and actions
that makes it possible for people to find ways to be generous, regardless of
their individual circumstances? And how can we celebrate generosity when it shows up?

This U.S. Thanksgiving Day, I want encourage Green Hand
Reskilling supporters and participants to find creative ways to thank the
people who have generously shared during the course of the year and made our
lives richer through their sharing.

Stanley: Thanks again...they're doing great!

Did someone give you seeds this year? Show you how easy it
is to make your own kimchi?Maybe
help you brainstorm a solution to a gardening problem?Share a recipe that turned into a
family favorite?Weld a broken garden
tool? Help you break through your hesitation in starting your first faux finish
paint job somewhere in your home?

My suggestion here is to let those people know the impact
they’ve had. Of course, you probably thanked them at the time, and your thanks
at the time completed the cycle of giving. Thanking them again, though, completes
a bigger cycle: the cycle of generosity.Completing the cycle of generosity is as easy as being generous with your
thanks. Doing so really gets to the heart of the Green Hand concept, and it’s a
potent place to stand as a change agent for a more livable and resilient
culture.

Photos are fun and easy to share these days:

“Look what those sunflower seeds turned into!”

“Here are Joey and Linda in the costumes I made after you
walked me through how the sewing machine works. Thanks again!”

“The aloe vera is alive and doing well!”

“Here’s me wearing the first scarf I knitted. Thank you for
your help getting me started!”

…or you can let people know in any way that works for you.

Thanks. Giving.It’s a profound concept, a reminder to all of us to relate to the gifts
of life with thanks and gratitude. Because in the end, it’s all a gift.

Saturday, May 6, 2017

One morning during the holiday season last year, I saw an item
in a gift catalog called “The World’s Smartest Food Scale.” Able to weigh up to
four different food items at once, a close-up color photo showed several
luscious-looking raspberries on one weighing area, some pineapple chunks (for
color contrast, presumably) on another, and so on. The description went on to detail
how, after weighing the food items, the scale will then transmit the data
wirelessly to a computer or mobile device, which can then access an online
database and provide nutritional analysis. My first thought was: Seriously? If people were
eating more raspberries and pineapple than pizza or McEngineered food, they
probably wouldn’t need to weigh them.

After reading the catalog description, I happened to look
out the window, where I saw some sparrows hopping around and occasionally
pecking.

This led me to wonder: Apparently, the sparrows are able to find
their ways and feed themselves through a challenging Michigan winter, selecting
bits of food that will keep them alive and pretty healthy from whatever is
available. Can we? I know I’ve opened a big can of worms in the way I
formulated this question, but it can’t be helped— and I’m sure quite a few bird
species will probably approve.

As I pondered this question, I recalled a television
documentary I’d seen on PBS in the early 90s called The Last Navigator. I later learned the show was a follow-up to a
book of the same title by Steve Thomas, and I took the time recently to read it. Its subject was traditional oceangoing navigation
as practiced by the seafaring peoples of Micronesia. The author, who had a longtime interest in sailing, had
arranged an apprenticeship with Mau Piailug, a traditional master navigator
from the Micronesian island of Satawal.

The islanders in the region migrated across the vast Pacific
without compass, charts, or other instrumentation. With unwavering focus Piailug
was able to guide an outrigger canoe and crew to reach destinations across
hundreds or even thousands of miles of open ocean using only celestial bearings
and a body of traditional seafaring wisdom. Doing so requires complete
immersion in the dynamic complexities of ocean swell systems, animal cues,
changing currents and weather conditions. To miss one’s target on an ocean
voyage in these scantily provisioned vessels is to risk death. Nonetheless, the
inhabitants of these far-flung scraps of land regularly journeyed back and
forth to hunt, fish, trade, and refresh their local gene pools.

Given that within living memory the earth has been home to people who were capable of traversing the Pacific in small watercraft by their wits alone,
could it really be that we now need an internet-linked device to navigate our dinner
plates? I think I hear the sparrows laughing. But I feel it’s worth considering, because navigation –
whether to the next island or the next bite to eat – is a central biological
process.

To avoid becoming someone else’s lunch is also part of the
equation. I was recently amazed as I watched an online video showing staph
bacteria attempting to evade a prowling white blood cell.Odd to think that’s going on inside us
all the time.Further, the process
of navigation can be seen to scale up to higher-order biological systems such as individual deer, ducks and people, and then further to herds, flocks, and
groups of the same species. Even ecosystems, nations and cultures can be said to
navigate.As individuals, we have a
hardwired “rooting reflex” that helps us with our very first navigational task:
finding the nipple.It’s critical,
and it’s important to note that the first task of an individual is to seek
connection.

Consider the sequence of nautical navigation that has
furnished such a ready metaphor in this article for the many kinds of navigation we engage
in. We begin with ancient seafaring skills like those of Mau Piailug, who
journeyed through ocean waves well beyond sight of land completely unaided by
instrumentation. We see explorers up through the 19th century
relying on stars and landmarks, then compasses, charts and observation logs. Finally
we come to modern GPS-guided ships with full instrumentation, including
satellite communications and information systems.

But what happens to the voyage as layer upon layer of
instrumentation are added?What
happens to the awareness of the voyager?Finally, what becomes of the ocean? What exactly is this stuff we’re
floating on – you can interpret this as broadly as you like – and does the
ocean really even matter anymore if we barely have to look at it and it's merely something to churn through? Do we even bother
to taste our food after we weigh it with the World’s Smartest Scale? What
becomes of life when we withdraw from immediate connection by stages and degrees?

A few years ago I read a book by Jean Liedloff called The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness
Lost that might shed some light on these questions.Liedloff spent two and a half years
living with the Yequana and other indigenous people of the upper Orinoco River
basin in Venezuela. In one passage (p. 19) she describes her astonishment upon
seeing groups of very slightly built Tauripan people joking and laughing while
carrying 75lb packs for miles through equatorial jungle heat – a physical task that
would buckle grumbling Europeans twice their size.How did they do it?Her answer was by no means simple – I recommend reading the book – but
what it came down to is that, like the Micronesian navigators, these people
were in continuous communication with their environment. Because they were not in a state of
internal or external disconnection with their surroundings, the jungle supported
them just as surely as the sea supported Piailug as he guided his outrigger
canoe through the night toward distant horizons. It’s complete connection, a
continuum.

I see some profound implications in Liedloff’s observations,
and have seen parallels in other stories I’ve read. For example, my wife Mary and I were married at Camp Ohiyesa
in Holly, Michigan, where, it turns out, the noted Oglala Lakota medicine man Black
Elk spent time during the early 20th century.Seeking to know more, I read the famous account of his life and views, Black
Elk Speaks, and somewhere along the way (maybe from the Ohiyesa camp
director at the time) I picked up a story about how Black Elk, by then an elder,
was observed standing by the lake without a shirt one freezing cold morning. Concerned
for his safety and health, a member of the camp staff hurried over and
suggested he get a coat on so not to catch cold.Black Elk replied that on the contrary, this was his way of
staying healthy, but acknowledging that these “old ways” were not understood.

In considering that scenario, again we see contrary cultural
postures, with the indigenous perspective focused on living through
environmental connection and integration while the Western view encourages limiting
that exposure. As I recounted the Black Elk story to Mary, she replied by quoting
some passages from a book she had in her hands at that moment called Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich. The author
includes a brief account of the life of John Tanner, a settler who was kidnapped
by the Shawnee in 1789 at the age of nine and later sold into the Ojibwe tribe to
be raised as the son of a woman whose own son had died. From that point
forward, Tanner grew up socialized completely as an Ojibwe. The account cited a description of an astonishing feat of endurance in which
Tanner and a companion took turns riding and running beside a horse to cover a
distance of 70 miles in a single day, which recalled some of Liedloff’s
descriptions of people in the remote Venezuelan jungles. But the part of Erdrich’s
narrative that motivated Mary’s sharing was another passage: “Visiting his
family in Kentucky after having lived all his life in the north woods, John
Tanner fell ill. He grew claustrophobic when nursed inside of a house, and had
to sleep outside in his brother’s yard to regain his strength.” (p. 46)

Though it may seem counterintuitive in our culture, it’s
possible to seek one’s well being through exposure to the world and to find security
through deeper connection with it. It’s very different than having one’s
experience mediated by a screen as most of my readers are presumably doing at this moment. Along
the same lines, when comparing traditional Micronesian navigators with modern sailing
captains and pilots, I am struck by the contrast between Piailug, with his hand
on the rudder in continuous engagement with his rigorous and unpredictable
environment, versus the relative isolation we see among modern navigators as
they retreat to the techno-wombs in the cabins of their ships.

I speak as a refugee from a culture that either despite or
because of its technological wizardry appears to have fundamentally lost its
bearings. Among my people these days, it is not uncommon to seek satellite
navigational support to find one’s way to a Friday night party, and judging by the
catalog item that inspired this writing, apparently some of us think that just
to be on the safe side it’s a good idea to employ a wireless Internet hookup to
negotiate the hazardous and uncertain terrain of their daily meals. And it’s
not that I don’t appreciate technology, from the gas-fired furnace in my home currently
pushing the chill back a step to the electronic medium
through which I now communicate with you. However, with these examples and many
others, there’s a price to be paid in the way technology reconfigures our connections
and our distances, and not all the costs involved in these tradeoffs are easy to
quantify. One thing that does seem clear is that on a fundamental level, as we put
increasing amounts of technology between us and our environment, we are also,
in effect, backing away from it.

As we do so, I find myself wondering what we might be
backing ourselves into.

Thursday, February 23, 2017

I’ve recently been reading a book called The Spell of the Sensuous by David
Abram, an author identified as one of Utne
Reader’s “hundred visionaries who are changing the world.”I admit I’ve felt a little
self-conscious while reading it in auto repair waiting rooms and other public
places because the title is suggestive of pulp romance or erotic fiction.How sensuality ended up being conflated
with sexuality in this culture is clearer once you read the book, but that’s
not what it’s about. It’s revealing, however, that sex is one of the places in
life where the loss of felt connection that Abram does explore is revealed as
dysfunctional and ultimately self-defeating. The habit of objectification that
reduces breathing trees to so much lumber and a living landscape to an
engineering problem doesn’t play out very well when applied to the intimate
partners who show up in our beds as mother nature’s representatives, asking for
connection.

Abram doesn’t write about this at all, but I’m starting here
because it’s personal. We’ve all felt objectified at times, and it registers as
anything from rudeness to dehumanizing violation. Most people understand, on
some level, that treating others as objects is inappropriate. Often missing
from our understanding is that it’s a pervasive feature of Western
consciousness, one that efficiently produces destructive results across a broad
range of human activities.

These destructive results are all around us and dominate the
news. Abram starts with questions about the origins of the ecological crisis in
particular and Western culture’s apparent disregard for the needs of non-human
nature. The answer he brings us to is surprisingly simple: we do not
experience, as most indigenous peoples do, an immediate and felt connection
with the mood of our local river, nor feel in ourselves the place in the
general order of things of the redwing blackbird perched on a swaying reed.Instead of this felt connection, which
helped keep the world’s indigenous peoples in fair balance with their
environments for thousands of years, there is objectification, separation,
distance, and disregard. Western culture, argues Abram, treats rivers and
redwing blackbirds as “things,” and often enough the culture treats its own members
as “things,” too, which allows for astonishingly callous disregard. If we were
feeling ourselves dancing with the living features of our world, we wouldn’t
treat our dance partners that way. But we don’t feel it. We’re not dancing. So
what are we doing?

Says Abram:

“To define
nature as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to actively engage
us and to provoke our senses; we thus
block our perceptual reciprocity with that being. By linguistically
defining the surrounding world as a determinate set of objects, we cut our
conscious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing
bodies.” (page 56)

There’s a lot in those two sentences. Consider the many ways
this basic dynamic has been playing out between the Standing Rock Sioux and the
companies involved in constructing an oil pipeline at Standing Rock, North
Dakota. I’ve spoken with a couple people who have been there, and I’ve followed
media accounts that included personal interviews, reporting, and video
documentation of what’s happening. Events are often reported as a clash between
members of a tribe seeking to prevent a pipeline from endangering its water, and
business interests and their law enforcement and private security proxies. The
images of uniformed, helmeted, armed and armored police arrayed against a
colorful collection of eclectically dressed people carrying feathers and sage
have captured attention around the world.

Underneath that confrontation, often framed in terms of
legal rights and political objectives, is a basic difference in consciousness. On
the one hand we have the bankers and businesspeople operating in faraway towers
and their on-the-ground machine operators and police forces. These people have demonstrated
no felt connection with the land and see it and the local rivers as merely
impediments to getting oil to world markets to realize “profits” in terms of
dollars. On the other hand, we have a people who directly feel this land, for
whom its tearing open by machines is experienced as a violation not only of the
land and their ancestral connection to it, but of their own bodies. Those digging
machines are tearing the people up, and once constructed the pipeline will endanger
the river that flows through their veins.

Further, I see a pattern of evidence suggesting that one of
the project’s objectives is the destruction of the indigenous sensibilities and
felt connection with the land that have informed the opposition. In this, it’s
much like the witch burnings and inquisitions of Europe, when hierarchical
structures within those cultures began attacking anything that remained of their
own indigenous roots (as Abrams goes on to note on page 199), even, as I
recently learned elsewhere, publicly burning the harps and murdering the
harpers of Ireland. Likewise, it looks to me like Standing Rock has devolved
into an attempt on the part of big business to exterminate a particular kind of
consciousness, demoralize it, demonstrate its weakness, and win recruits to a
less feeling way of existing in the service of these business entities and the
governmental agencies they have co-opted.

The developing story at Standing Rock was suppressed for a
very long time. From what I can see, it spread via nonmainstream news and
social media, and opposition gathered momentum. Why? Is it an important
story?Evidently quite a few
people thought so. But the images, reports and information concerning events at
Standing Rock did not spread because of events in Standing Rock alone. The
information disseminated because of events happening in individual people’s
bodies. Feeling shock, revulsion, anger, grief, and even horror, millions passed
the story along using whatever harps we could find in this post-bardic culture.
The story passed from feeling/sensing/intelligent body to feeling/sensing/intelligent
body. I think it’s amazing how it grew, given the competition for people’s attention
bandwidth by Candy Crush, instant Gene Wilder memes, the antic 2016 US general election,
and the ongoing deluge of cute animal videos.

In me and I expect many others, the stories triggered a sick
sense of eerie dread, a clamoring for justice, a desire to offer material
support, and grief for what the people at the Standing Rock encampment have
been enduring at the hands of militarized police forces. However, I felt something, and by connecting with
these feelings within myself, I connected with these people. From there, seemingly
chance encounters led to one-on-one conversations with people who had spent
time in the camp, thus breaking through the mental habits of compartmentalizing
and objectifying so typical of Western consciousness. First, I opened up to it
emotionally. Next thing I knew, without doing anything more than opening to
that connection, I was looking into living eyes and hearing living voices in
which I could see and feel the events reflected.

And please, I am not comparing my “armchair protesting” with
the on-the-ground struggles, hardships, injuries and indignities suffered by the
Water Protectors in North Dakota. Emphatically: No. I am suggesting that for the water
protectors to ultimately prevail, and not just in North Dakota but globally, we
must move into the same kind of felt sense of connection that is motivating and
empowering them in their actions. We have to start recovering this kind of
awareness, beginning wherever we are. We cannot count on the Water Protectors
to feel the devastation for us; we have to bravely feel it for ourselves. And,
with utmost respect for the wisdom traditions of the earth’s remaining
indigenous peoples, that wisdom won’t make any sense, or be of any use to us, unless
we get in touch with our own indigenous wisdom, the kind that arises from the
inside.

Making this connection may not be easy for many of us. This
is no accident. We are socialized in countless ways out of our indigenous
wisdom and the felt connection with ourselves, our surroundings and our fellow
beings that informs it. We are conditioned instead to accept received ideas,
often and especially in ways that run counter to that felt sense. For example,
consider that in the United States, generations of mothers whose every instinct
told them to pick up their crying infants were advised by authoritative doctors
that “crying is good for a developing baby’s lungs” or that newborns wailing in
terror at what they can only assume is abandonment will “teach the baby to
self-soothe,” despite the fact that separation from caregivers has proven
universally fatal for helpless young mammals since the age of the dinosaurs. Or
consider young children who are told to sit still for seven hours a day when
every cell in their bodies is telling them to move around a lot and explore the
outdoors to develop their growing, sensing bodies in accord with the last
million years of human evolution. By following such social programs – and
perhaps worse, emulating the models of other people who have preceded us as
initiates in these dark arts – eventually we lose connection with our own
feeling bodies, and after that happens, it’s but a short step toward running a
bulldozer of sullen self-righteousness through ancient burial grounds, or
committing any number of crimes against the earth and its inhabitants.

How do we know if we are moving in the direction of our indigenous
wisdom? Here’s a handy chart below. If we’re moving in the direction of our
indigenous wisdom, we’re probably going to be moving toward the column on the
right. The dominant cultural mindset is outlined on the left.

Experience mediated by text, screens, techImmediate
experience

SymbolizingFeeling

Abstract thoughtsPerception
as conversation

ProgrammingSpontaneous
response

Objectifying Connecting

Machines, engineered systems & processesOrganic
systems

Logical, calculating, detachedHolistic
reasoning

Unrooted, metastasizingConnected
to place

Head-centered experienceWhole
body experience

Clock-drivenBiological/planetary rhythms

So here’s a question: Looking at these two columns, which
kind of consciousness fills your working days? From what
I can see, for most people, our education and employment tend to move us toward
the column on the left. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that many of us would
seek to find balance in recreational activities that move us toward the column
on the right. This is fairly hopeful. It’s a good sign when people still know
somehow that walking along the beach can be a helpful antidote to 50 weeks spent
under fluorescent lights staring at a computer screen in an office cubicle.
This is what I mean by indigenous wisdom, and given the forces arrayed against
it, it has proven remarkably resilient.

However, there are some caveats in this, and we are in no
position for hasty self-congratulations. We’ve been colonized, you see, by a
kind of alien intelligence, and it doesn’t give up easily. We might go to the
beach, but the alien intelligence will nudge us into thinking we have to consume
more than sunshine and salt breezes to get our money’s worth of “fun” while we’re
there. We might gingerly feel our ways toward some semblance of embodied
consciousness in a yoga studio, but if we’re like most Americans, as we get
down on all fours for the first time in ages we very likely will wonder if our
hips are too big, if we look sexy in spandex or if we have all our needed equipment.
The first thoughts amount to self-objectification; the second reflects the commercial
colonization of yogic practice.

I live surrounded on three sides by one of Michigan’s lovely
state recreation areas –hundreds of acres studded with lakes, stands of pine,
and second-growth oak/hickory forest with trees now reaching maturity in some
places. Compared with when I moved here twelve years ago, when I walk the
trails today it feels more like a racetrack for bicycles.Although it’s praiseworthy
that people are getting outdoors and away from their screens for a while, again
I see a very evident infatuation with fashionable biking attire and fancy new
high-tech bicycles and gear. Being a man I know how guys tend to be proud of
whatever they’ve got going between their legs. In this case (no surprise) it’s
a machine, and, as if everyone needs to be reminded that these cyclists are not
street cobblers in Calcutta but instead drove here with their bikes atop their
cars, their bikes and biking gear have to be super fancy looking. It’s not
enough to simply walk in the woods, to amble along or wander off the trail and
find a nice place to sit for a while. Instead, it’s more like: “Commuting v.3.0,
The Fitness Version.” The sandy, forested hills are not felt as unique entities
to get to know, dialog with and explore, but seem instead a mere backdrop for further
ego-driven conquering. I step off the footpaths and let them pass at a clip.

Forgive me if this seems harsh. The point is, even within the minimal gestures most people
in our culture make toward feeling some kind of connection with the body, the natural world,
or with something that isn’t packaged, sold, or pushed at us through a screen,
the fragmented bands of indigenous consciousness are colonized and subjected to
settlement and exploitation by commercial interests as soon as new territory
opens, and this says nothing about the vast swaths of inner landscape already
ceded. No wonder so many people seem to be feeling backed up onto a reservation
that is being steadily encroached upon and compromised.

I believe this is why the Standing Rock confrontation has
gathered so much attention, and why so many of us have felt so deeply what’s
really at stake there. Every one of us is a Standing Rock: a piece of the earth
where this perennial confrontation is occurring, a place where indigenous
wisdom is engaged in an ongoing skirmish with the abstract mandates and
fortified self-deceptions of a culture out of touch with the planet. The ongoing
conquest and confrontation is happening inside every one of us, and I suspect
that becoming aware of this might ultimately decide the outcome of the larger battle.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

It’s February, so why am I thinking about naked gardening? Maybe
you’ve heard of World Naked Gardening Day, an annual May 1 event whose
existence I know about only because it makes the rounds on social
media every year, much to the titillation of many who are out for a pleasant spring scroll down
their Facebook newsfeeds. The idea of standing naked in the garden, well, let’s
just say it’s got mythic dimensions, and while I honor those who buck their
cultural programming and get out there to actually do it, my entry today is
geared more toward understanding the many people who have yards surrounding
their homes, but who as yet have no actual garden in which to even try naked
gardening, were they so inclined when the weather warms up.

Because, let’s be honest: standing naked on a chemically
treated lawn in front of geometrically pruned foundation plantings wouldn’t be quite
the same. For one thing, there’s little to do out there: no reason to bend to
the soil, nothing to pick, plant, taste or smell as it offers itself out of the
wet spring earth, and come summertime, no sunflowers or cosmos to sway to their different tempos in the warm breezes and strategically
reveal and conceal the gardeners' bodies. Instead, there’s nothing. So let’s back it up a notch and get the
gardens in place first. It’ll be more fun for everybody.

However, as I consider this more basic issue, I see that the
problems involved in establishing a garden are much the same as those we would
likely encounter in encouraging gardening in the nude: cultural resistance, a
sense of being exposed and alone in one’s passions and life path, and quite
possibly in many locations, legal ramifications. But ay yi yi! The bleak
uniformity of suburban landscaping! Consider what we're really talking about here. Among people in the world, these are the privileged, and among their precious privileges is something truly remarkable: access to a piece of land. And yet out of this we see crafted a strange kind of sterile, anonymous nowhereland. What’s that about, really? Seems to me it’s
about conformity, and about the perceived safety of not standing out.It’s also about class identification,
as my friend Lois Robbins was kind
enough to enlighten a group of us who had assembled on Earth Day some years
ago.In my mind, conformity and
class identification are connected: “People like us – we normal people – don’t do that.” Right. We don’t have time.
We’re on Facebook or playing candy crush or watching professional sports on TV.

But given the possibility of a discontinuity in the food
supply, say, or even just more of the same given that food quality has
measurably declined as the decades have rolled by, it might be time to reconsider
such social preoccupations. Herd thinking and herd behavior do not represent humanity
at its finest, nor do they typically tend to be adaptive. Most people don’t
even consider the stampede of suburban outgrowth as a herd phenomenon, but
there it is, pretty much the same from coast to coast.

Fortunately, the long tradition of American self-sufficiency
has not been completely exterminated, and in fact every spring we see tons of
garden centers filled with plants, including many vegetable starts and seeds. By
most accounts, gardening remains the most popular hobby in the United States. Nonetheless,
when I walked out to my garden a few minutes ago and stood in the snow that had
fallen on the duff of leaves amidst the still-standing but stripped-bare kale
stalks, I counted ten homes with windows visible from where I stood.Of these, only two that I know of have any food
growing on the property at any time of year. These do not represent substantial
plantings: in one yard I’ve sometimes seen a few tomatoes, and in the other,
of all things, four large container-grown fig trees, the love of an Armenian
immigrant who lives across the road. The reason I can report this with some confidence is because gardening
is not a private activity. What we do out there is visible, as is our overall
success or failure.Regardless of
what we’re wearing, we’re basically exposed for all to see out there. It’s no wonder
to me that people who are unsupported by history, knowledge or community have
a hard time taking first steps toward growing some of their own food.

Noticing this, my hope is that those who “always wanted to
start a garden” might gain some insight into some of the reasons why they not
have done so yet, and find a way to start. I was lucky to have grown up next
door to the Wu family, Chinese immigrant parents with two US-born boys about my age who treated the yard behind their ranch house as a place
for productivity instead of merely a placeholder for underused lawn furniture.
I vividly recall Mrs. Wu showing me how to gently pull the trumpets from her red
salvia flowers to taste the nectar, and Mr. Wu showing me how to build a
compost pile and check the corn for worms. Next thing you know, at age six I had
gathered sunflower seeds from the bird feeder to plant in my sandbox and was
watching them rocket upwards to a height of 7 feet.Amazingly, I also had family support in converting that sandbox into
a vegetable garden. (It was a bottomless sandbox, and the zucchinis did
especially well.) Later, as a seventh grader equipped with a plan and a shovel, I got a
affirmative reply when I asked if I could dig up a section of sod out back and build an herb
garden.

In revisiting the chief purpose of this blog – the sharing
of gardening and other knowledge to build healthier and more shock resistant communities – I feel less than successful. Part of it is, I may have
underestimated the zone of social resistance and the nakedness of every
gardener before the court of neighborhood opinion and their own inner critics.

For this reason, if as the days grow longer this spring you
find yourself feeling that this is finally the year when you’ll try growing
something edible, I salute you. If
you’re planning on starting a garden but haven’t done so yet, one shortcut is
to start by cultivating relationships, people who will be on your side when you
go ahead and be the neighborhood weirdo with hops vines flowering on your porch. Someday maybe you can invite your neighbors in to sample your home brew –
who knows what converts you’ll win? Or you can be the person who gives a
neighbor girl her very first sun-ripened strawberry; it’s a moment that can
change a life. Or just be the one who confidently walks out some quiet August
evening some years from now and returns to your kitchen with a fresh bunch of
kale to feed your family. You won’t be naked, but you will be noticed, and that’s
ok —
you never know when you might get a visit from a neighbor kid with a lot of
questions and an unused sandbox in the back yard.

Friday, March 18, 2016

I started this blog in 2011 as a vehicle to promote a simple,
time-tested idea: By sharing basic skills we can build more resilient
communities. A deeper look at the concept reveals that it’s not just the skills
being shared that strengthen the community, it’s the relationships being built.
At an even deeper level, we see that the values that skill sharing promotes outlast
individual relationships and inform new relationships as they come into being: Skill
sharing encourages the recognition that our own security and happiness is
enhanced by the security and happiness of our neighbors, and our neighbors’
neighbors.

Taken sentence by sentence, that’s plenty to think about.
I’m fond of observing that when one plants a seed in the garden with a child, one
plants two seeds at once: There’s the seed
that goes into the ground, and there are the seeds of connection, relationship,
possibility, and wonder that grow in the child. Oops, that’s more than two!

Yet it’s the same with sharing skills and learning
experiences with people of any age. By sharing such learning experiences, we
build knowledge, relationships,
trust, and enduring pro-social values.

However, such natural connections are for the most part broken
or breaking in American life, especially in relationship to skills connected to
food, clothing, shelter, and health care. Taking the place of these basic
social functions, we find monetized relationships and high-energy tools. This
is why it’s possible to live in a typical American neighborhood and have no
idea who our neighbors are. We drive energy-intensive cars to our highly
productive jobs, and then some of our surplus productivity (our “earnings”) is electronically
tube-fed back into our households to pay for the privilege. As a byproduct of
this arrangement, we also see a shift in values that decouples oursense
of well-being from that of our neighbors.
The attitude that starts to take hold is: To heck with them. I have my own car,
my own TV. I worked hard for these things. Get your own.

All of this would be bad enough, but on a practical level, if
at some point the money system breaks down or the tools and devices can’t be
powered up, what do we really have left? We don’t know how to provide for our
basic needs, most of us don’t have local relationships in place to help us solve
that problem, and judging by how things are going, many people do not even possess
the kinds of values that would help navigate toward real solutions.

Thus we can identify several levels for social intervention:
materials, skills, relationships, and the values that support the transfer of
skills and the development of relationships. Granted, it seems a tall order. We
do not have the resources to address these problems one at a time. Fortunately,
it isn’t necessary, because (and this is an amazing thought!) it is not possible to do one thing at a time.
The world simply doesn’t work like that. Instead, as we saw in the example of
planting a seed with a child, everything we do propagates consequences in
multiple directions.

Permaculture has a design concept called “stacking
functions” that makes use of this. In a land use design project, the concept of
stacking functions means that any element of the design, be it a tree, chicken
coop or a compost heap, can perform multiple services simultaneously. So, when I
kept chickens, I planted a mulberry tree to the south of the coop, and placed a
compost heap nearby under another tree. The chicken manure fed the trees, and the
trees fed, cooled, and protected the chickens from airborne predators. Together
the trees kept the compost shaded and moist while the chickens turned the
compost, feeding it with their droppings while the compost fed them with bugs
and worms. And that’s just the beginning. Ultimately, the system produced eggs,
for example, as well as nutrient-rich compost for my garden.

Permaculture imitates natural systems in its design processes.
In the case of stacking functions, the underlying reality is that no action
generates a single, linear outcome. Since everything does many things at once, it
should be possible, assuming we're willing to more comprehensively account for them, to start aligning these consequences in desirable ways.

The relevant point here is that functions are always “stacked,” though perhaps
not necessarily in ways that lead to positive outcomes. When I get in my car, for
example, I’m not just moving myself from place to place, I’m also creating a
zone of lethal hazard around myself, putting social distance between myself and
pedestrians, arrogating enormous physical space and material resources for myself and my vehicle,
promoting the proliferation of ugly, auto-related infrastructure like parking
lots and traffic courts, supporting the demand for petroleum and the despotic regimes funded by it, and of course befouling the air and ultimately
helping to kill off the oceans and wreck the climate. And that’s just for
starters.

But hey, I’m just driving to pick my kids up from school.

Yet in this example, perhaps the worst effect of all is the
mass hypnosis that makes this seem both normal and desirable, stunting the
imaginations of all who buy into it. And this is true everywhere we look: chemical
agriculture, US foreign policy, law, medicine, education, you name it. All of
these are proliferating negative consequences in multiple directions while our
attention is focused only on the narrow outcomes connected to their
ostensible purposes. The conditioning is: Look at the grain pouring into the grain elevator, don’t
look at the algae bloom from agricultural runoff that renders Lake Erie’s water
unfit for human consumption. See the burger in a bag, but ignore the
person handing it to us who is barely scraping by, ignore the vanishing South American
rainforest felled for commodity crop soybean production, and ignore the species
extinctions and loss of cultures and language among the indigenous people of
the region.

I’ve been saying for years [for example, see here]
that the positive side of the fragmented thinking evident in our current
systems is that it results in a proliferation of points of effective action.
The food system is a great example, given that we see breaks in critical relationships
all the way from soil to table. Every apparent break is a place where
participation can forge a new connection, whether it’s growing our own food,
building relationships with our growers, or preparing food from scratch instead
of buying into the cult of commercially prepared foods.

That still holds true, but now I see how much more we’re
really doing when we do these things. Since as we have seen, “stacking
functions” isn’t just a great design idea, it’s
the rule, then replacing a broken connection with a healthy one will have
manifold impact. So for example, replacing fast food with home cooked meals has
profound ramifications:We’ve
filled our homes with delicious smells, we’ve taught our children what real
food tastes like, how to value it, and maybe how to cook it; we’ve nourished
ourselves deep into our cells, we’ve made our love tangible through our
connection with the earth’s bounty, we’ve changed how we spend, we’ve demonstrated
that our families are worth caring for—and that’s just for starters.

If a part of that home cooked meal comes from a home garden,
we have added to our outdoor time with healthy exercise, improved the soil and its
capacity to hold carbon and retain moisture, improved our diets with low-cost
vegetables, eliminated (if we’re smart) the use of cosmetic lawn chemicals on
the soil that feeds us, cut some of the carbon footprint in our energy-intensive
food system, kept yard waste onsite as a soil amendment, and taught our
children where food comes from. Even something as simple as recycling has huge
knock-on effects: when newspaper and cardboard is recycled, it’s not just the
oxygen-breathing trees we save, but also the carbon that is normally emitted in
paper manufacture from virgin materials, plus the recycling jobs created
locally, watersheds protected wherever forests remain standing … and much else.

Is it enough? Have we tilted the scales toward
sustainability? No—not by a long shot. Does this concern me? Yes.

However, I’m still feeling hopeful. True, our culture’s
fragmented thinking has created quite a mess as it has been projected onto a
world built on the laws of interconnection and wholeness. But what gives me
hope is not just that we can make a little difference here and there by
changing how we think and what we do. What’s really hopeful is that we’re doing
a lot more than we think we are – we’re always planting many seeds at once, and
of course every seed has the potential of many seeds within it. These can
include changes on all levels, extending even to the values and cultural norms
that drive us. Thus, my hope is not based on the complacent attitude that we’re
already “doing all we can,” so everything is bound to be okay. Rather, I’m
excited by the fact that knowing how powerful our actions are can embolden us
to kick it up a notch. Let’s do it!

Friday, December 25, 2015

At Christmastime
each year here in the United States we will often see nativity scenes, especially
in people’s front lawns and in churchyards. They range from simple scenes
depicting only Jesus, Mary and Joseph to elaborate dioramas including a full
cast of characters. In these larger versions, in addition to the shepherds, angels and animals, we may also see three other figures, often in decidedly more
colorful dress, who are intended to represent those called The Three Wise Men,
the Magi, or the Three Kings from the East. We are told in the Bible that the
Magi navigated by means of a star, got a piece of intelligence from
King Herod along the way, and arrived at the scene bearing gifts of gold,
frankincense, and myrrh.

Although I’m not
much of a churchgoer, I have long been fascinated by the element in the story
of the Magi traveling at some risk and expense to see a manifestation of divine
light and love, and I’ve wondered about the gifts they deemed appropriate for
the occasion.

In some
traditions, the arrival of the Magi is celebrated as Epiphany, which comes from
a Greek word meaning ‘appearance.’ And the first thing I notice is that we all have our own epiphanies: times
when things are illuminated for us and appear in a new light, sometimes even showing up where there had been no light at all. Such moments glow like an inner crèche, and
by virtue of the newness and possibility inherent in them, they often seem to gather
their own assembly of witnesses, both within us and beyond.

So move a little
closer in, angels, shepherds, and magi: this little epiphany is mine. I see in
the gifts of the Magi a good indicator, poetically speaking, of the gifts to
bear with us as we approach any epiphany, place of emergence, or illuminated
way of being in the world.

Let’s start with
myrrh and frankincense. In origin, these are the dried sap of trees. Sap is the
mobile, fluid element that flows up from the roots clasping the Earth and down
from the leaves outstretched to gather light from the nearest star. Moving
between these polarities, tree sap draws qualities from both as it runs in its
daily circuit between the two. Interrupt this movement by wounding the trees’
bark and the resinous sap emerges. In their primary use, myrrh and frankincense
are vaporized in fire—their fragrances are said to raise the vibration and
sanctify a space, hence their use in ceremony.

The sap of trees
is literally their lifeblood, the active, connecting element that bridges every
apparent polarity and in doing so supports the life of the tree in all its
dimensions. The ability of a tree to hold the land is funded by its capacity to
reach for the sun and air, and the ability of a tree to reach for the sun and
air is funded by its ability to hold the land. The sap is the transporter of
these energies and resources. Likewise, the unity of the trunk is supported by
the multiplicity of roots and branches. The flexibility and the exposure of the
leaves is supported by the more rigid and protected quality of the wood, and
again vice versa. The dried sap of these trees thus embodies the essence of
this active process of living, growing and yes, even being wounded in a world
of chance and change.

Likewise, we
humans do much the same thing in our growth as we actively span and unify many
dimensions and qualities of our existence. Consider: our capacity for thought
is affected by whether or not we ate breakfast and what it was, and the development
of our high arts and skills grows from our passion and animal ferocity. Our
craziest dreams, subtlest reasoning, and most finely attuned feelings are
needed by turns to find balance in our awareness amidst the tumult of our
experience. We balance within and without, left and right brain, action and
contemplation, work and play, sleeping and waking, the changing seasons, and all of the the contingencies and conditions of our lives. And, as we dynamically unify and
draw energy from our often rough-and-tumble living and weathering of various
kinds of storms, we create a flow with unique qualities within us, just as
trees do. We gain character.

To complete the
metaphor here, the distilled essence of our lives in the world—what we
learn, how we grow, how it shapes us and even how it hurts us—is central to the
gifts we bear on the way to our personal epiphanies. Recognizing the value of living
amidst all these opposing forces, ups and downs, bumps, bruises, paradoxes and
contradictions, is key to carrying our troubles as gifts. Remember that the myrrh
tree oozes that sweetness from its wounds, standing out in the sun on the Horn
of Africa.

The counterpoint
to all the dynamism we see in the production of myrrh and frankincense, of
course, is gold. If myrrh and frankincense embody the essence of a present-tense
life astraddle numerous polarities, a temporal world of contingency and risk, gold
could be said to represent the state in which there never was a polarity to
unify: the eternal, the unchanging, the untarnishable spirit. Gold is
chemically inert, unaffected, and unchanging. This is why it can sit at the
bottom of the sea in the wreckage of a Spanish galleon for 500 years and still
have value. As the most malleable metal, pure gold can be hammered into endless
changes in outward form, yet inwardly it remains the same.

So consider the
contrast here: Gold is a metal forged in the heart of a dying star billions of
years ago; myrrh and frankincense, on the other hand, are the dried sap that
oozes from cuts in the bark of trees living on the surface of planet earth
today. In most uses, gold is endlessly recyclable. Myrrh and frankincense go up
in smoke and vanish.

Each of these
gifts embodies its own kind of preciousness and energetic signature. We all have
a place within us that is golden, unchanging and eternal. Everyone also has
that distilled essence of character arrived at by bearing our gold into a world
filled with dynamic and ever-changing polarities. Taken together, appreciated
and honored each in their own ways, these gifts make for an ideal combination
to bring to any epiphany or point of illumination in our lives. In fact, to
bear these gifts in full recognition of their value tends to draw us onward
toward these epiphanies.

Yet there seems
to be a tendency to separate them. It’s strange to consider it, but do we
really think the Magi would have been better advised to leave the myrrh and
frankincense at home and just bring some extra gold? Would this have improved the
gift?I don’t think so. And neither
do we value ourselves rightly if we only consider the quality of soul within
us, leaving out our connection to life’s flow and the character we have gained
by it, or on the other hand to only offer what we’ve gained by living and not that pure and untarnishable element we brought with us into
life.

The Bible story tells
us that Joseph was told in a dream to flee into Egypt. Hearing this, the
reasoning mind might suggest that maybe the family could have used that extra
gold! But that’s not how these stories work. For 2000 years we’ve read about myrrh,
frankincense, and gold. The translators found words for these things in other
languages and apparently saw nothing in these words to threaten the power structures
that employed them. So the inner message stood unchanged.

I’ve often felt
that this part of the Bible story was underappreciated, because it says so much
about how to approach an illuminated way of being. We absolutely must bring our inner
gold with us, our assurance of something eternal, that steady and sure place
deep within us that knows our value and our everlasting place in the order of
things. By means of this silent, weighty ballast, we right ourselves time and
again as the winds of change blow. The security that this kind of gold offers
also strengthens our ability to offer it up to these golden moments in the
certainty that we will ultimately be enriched instead of diminished by the
encounter. However, an equally precious and worthy offering is our unique
harvest of living in the world, and the beauty we have wrought from this
encounter: our lessons, our scars, our character, our history, and the essential
tone, feel and fragrance that belong to our unique lives.

Fundamentally, in any epiphany, we can only offer what we are, and,
we are all of this: We are the eternal enriched by the temporal, and we are
perfection itself somehow perfecting itself .

In a way, then,
since this is what we are, we bring this gift to every life encounter. Further,
since we are part of the cosmos becoming aware of itself, our appreciation for
all of the gifts we bring catalyzes their reception even when the “recipient”
to which we are offering ourselves is a relationship, a place, a moment -- in
short, to any personal epiphany or illuminated
encounter in the world. If we are to follow the example of the Magi as we navigate toward these epiphanies, we must value our offering: loving ourselves as golden eternal souls who never lost connection with the
divine, and in full appreciation for all our quirky eccentricities, our foibles and talents, errors and
inspirations, and in both our misbegotten motivations and our nobility in word
and deed. Loving ourselves in this comprehensive way primes the universe to
receive us in kind, or perhaps it would be better to say that doing so aligns
us with the cosmos and its unfolding and magnificent YES! And we can carry these gifts into any illuminated moment, be it a crowded bus, a thought or
feeling that comes at the end of a long day, a walk down a forest path leading
to a waterfall, or an encounter in a barn in an obscure little Middle Eastern town.

To every moment
we make an offering. Aware that we are in an encounter with the divine, we can
come as the Magi did: in adoration, and bearing gifts. We then behold and thus
participate in the miracle.